I don't know where Doctor_Jest is from, but in the UK it's the general term encompassing all kinds of paid leave from work -- holiday, sick leave, parental/adoption leave, certain union related activities, etc.
Either way, I got 6 weeks of PTO that I can start taking January 1st... so I'm covered if I get the flu.
Presumably not if he gets ill in December, after using up all/most of the time off.
Even when I'm wearing headphones, I often want to hear what's going on around me, whether it's "the destination of this train has now changed", "excuse me, do you have the time", or "what you fucking looking at?!". Or, for that matter, "the captain has switched on the seat-belt sign".
If anything, buds may help prevent tinnitus. If listening to music in a loud environment (like an airplane), the isolation provided by in-ear buds allows you to listen at MUCH lower volume levels than you might with non-isolating headphones.
This is true. However, I can often hear the music from other peoples' earphones when I get off a train, and that means it's probably too loud.
It's important in a variably-noisy environment (e.g. underground train) to set the volume appropriately in a quiet place and not increase it.
The analysis could probably be tailored to fit any assertion you wanted to make. A breakdown by state in the US probably reveals significant discrepancies.
And if the UK were split into constituent parts, no US state is likely to be worse than Scotland for general health and life expectancy.
From the summary: "The report notes that average life expectancy for American men, at 75.6 years"
From your link: "Men in Scotland are expected to live for 76 years"
Your comment is the only one that's not a joke, shame.
I wonder if this technique could be used with mosquitoes to find people. I.e. remember them verifying Bin Laden's location using DNA collected from a fake inoculation campaign
if not yet, it probably won't be long.
The taxonomists (and botanists, zoologists etc) have only recently been able to discover new species by sequencing the DNA. Previously, it took laborious searching and comparison of samples -- especially difficult with insects -- and that's not so accurate. Now, you can lay out some sticky paper and feed whatever sticks through a machine.
It's even better in the UK, where for a small illness you can't be required to visit a doctor.
It's the first thing on the Government page about sick leave: https://www.gov.uk/taking-sick-leave "Employees only need a fit note from a doctor after 7 days off work sick and have the right to use their statutory holiday entitlement during their sickness."
But the UK Railways are measured in Miles and Chains.
Old ones (which is most of the distance).
The London Underground, and anything built more recently (mostly various tram systems, but there are some proper railways), is measured in millimetres. Possibly massively refurbished ones too.
In any case, AIUI the actual work is done in millimetres. The miles and chains is mostly used to locate the site, "replace 100 metres of track on the northbound line at 82 miles4 chains from datum". (Source: someone at the DfT, so practical usage may or may not differ.)
Go into a British pub and ask for "a coke" and you could end up with either a half or a pint, which seems odd given that "a beer" will always get you a pint. However, nothing wrong with the European model of "a large beer" (500ml) or "a small beer" (250ml)...
Well, almost always. Sometimes "a beer" will get you a bottle, which might be 500mL, 300mL, 275mL, or something else. Not very likely in a traditional pub, but it happens in places that sell mostly wine or cocktails.
A more important improvement to British pubs would be displaying a price list. Last time I bought "two large cokes" in a pub it cost £5.20!
(We use "programme" for a TV programme, and "program" for a computer program, which is probably US influence, but I doubt the US influenced 'gram(me)'!)
(I don't disagree that the American spelling should be meter, it obviously should, and the British/Commonwealth/International/whatever one should be metre.)
You probably ended up with far more replies than necessary due to the way Slashdot hides low-score comments on popular stories. I didn't see any other comments when I made mine, but they were there. I think the website doesn't work very well once there are more than ~250 comments, and this story now has over 1250, making it the fifth-most commented-on this quarter. (Would be 2nd, if it wasn't for the school shooting.)
I used Google search in China, and found it very unreliable..COM wouldn't work at all, and.com.hm was erratic, so I used.co.uk. Some pages would load fine, but others wouldn't -- the first network packet (mostly the HTML header, title, etc) would be received, then the TCP connection would be reset. I suspect Google had something in the page like "Due to the government... some results have been removed", and the Great Firewall blocked these packets and shut the connection.
"In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 2 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org."
We just make them a lot taller, about 5 feet I think.
In Britain those are called "snow poles", and the reflective dots in the road are either "cateyes" or just reflectors. The reflectors on multi-lane roads in the UK are different colours depending where they are -- red for the side of the road, yellow for the middle, white for lane boundaries, and green for a slip-road or junction. I think the front and back of snow poles are coloured, but it's far too mild round here for them to be necessary (9C at the moment).
Word processors, printer drivers, operating systems, central heating controllers, sequencers, web servers, should be free - games, music compositions, etc. - not so much.
I don't understand - So if I create great software to manage an HVAC system to great efficiency I have to give it away, but if I make Angry Birds I don't? What's the difference?
Having purchased the HVAC system I might want to make changes to it, by changing the software. It's an important thing. (RMS started all this stuff when he couldn't get the source code to a printer driver).
I object to the requirement for visitors to give their fingerprints. I refuse to go to any country which has that policy, and I hope you too will refuse to go to any country that would demand your fingerprints.
Such as the United States?
Yes, they took mine last time I visited the US. I think if you were to visit here (UK) your fingerprints would be validated against those in the biometric passport (or visa), unless you live here.
Actually, milk is the one example where we don't tend to use metric in the UK - I've got a 2.272 litre (4 pint) bottle in my hand right now... Other dairy products like yoghurt and cream, fair enough, they're metric, but we still haven't let go of imperial measures for milk and beer, because 500ml is not quite enough.
Not quite -- most corner shops sell milk in 500mL multiples, and the 'luxury' brands (Cravendale, 'Tesco Finest' etc) do too. Since the quantity is slightly smaller it makes the price look better, for anyone that doesn't read the "per 100mL" number.
I wouldn't be surprised if other dairies switch the size of their bottles as the price of 1.14L reaches £1.
So, how many cubic meters in a liter (in your head, please, and quickly)?
A thousandth. If you don't know it, at least you can calculate it. A litre is 0.1m*0.1m*0.1m.
How many gallons in an acre-foot*? How many litres in 1000m^3?
(*Evidently a bad question, as Wikipedia says there are two kinds of acre-foot.)
How many grams of water in a cubic meter of water?
1m^3 of water is 1000kg, so 1,000,000g.
And why aren't either of these 1?
1 tonne, if you prefer. Not SI, but it is metric.
However, I don't know why not, and it doesn't really matter. Imperial has lots of different names -- you've used quart, for example. Metric has single-word names for a few everyday quantities (litre, tonne) and the rest are formed by using the prefixes -- something quart-sized would be measured in litres, but something fluid ounce sized in mL. The conversion between L and mL is easy, and sometimes (not all the time) useful.
it sucks for the average housewife. Seldom does one need ten times as much of something; but 2 or 4 times is pretty common. When you go to the grocery store, is everything packaged in even Liter increments?
Yes, or 250mL increments, or whatever is appropriate for the product. What increment would you expect it to be packed in?
Milk is 0.5L, 1L, 2L, but butter is 125g, 250g, 500g. Recipes would usually call for multiples of 25g.
I'll bet calculating cost/gram or cost/liter is as much of a challenge in Metric countries as cost/ounce is in the US.
As the other reply says, you will generally find cream and milk is sold in Europe in quantities like 250mL, 500mL, 1L, 2L. Also, most European countries require shops (or at least large shops) to label the price per [appropriate amount], which is probably 100mL for milk or cream. It's very easy to compare when the price written on the shelf is:
Milk, 1L £0.80 (8p/100mL)
Milk, 2L £1.50 (7.5p/100mL)
(There are some oddities with that law in the UK. Apples are sometimes "per 100g" and sometimes "per apple", I think it depends if the shop has packed them into bags or not. But the shops make it difficult when they can, so it presumably helps customers for the 99% of things without the odd exceptions.)
letter being 8,5x11 inches in north america but 15cm x 30 cm in Europe.
That would be a very elongated piece of paper.
A4 paper is 210x297mm, and is never called "letter", always A4. The odd lengths are because the ratio of the sides is 1:sqrt(2), which means an A4 sheet cut in half (called A5) or doubled (called A3) has the same ratio as the A4 sheet, so a document can be very easily scaled or reduced to a sheet twice/half/etc times the size.
A0 has area 1m^2. Paper weight is measured in g/m^2, i.e. the weight of a piece of A0 paper. Since A4 is (A1-half, A2-quarter, A3-eighth) a sixteenth of that, I know that each sheet of A4 paper in the ream by our printer (80g/m^2) weighs 80/16 = 5 grams.
The Japanese really do eat just about everything. Live, dead, cooked, raw, they'll eat it. Even rice ground into powder and reconstituted into a rubbery paste (mochi).
Sounds better than the crap "we" eat: the waste meat parts ground into a rubbery paste (mechanically recovered meat).
There are ridges in the road in a bus lane near where I live in London -- many double-decker buses (23 tonnes!) stop at more-or-less the same position in the road (the bus stop). I think the surface was probably built before some bus routes were directed down that road, since that isn't the case for most roads. Or it might be a consequence of replacing an articulated bus service with double-decker buses, which was stupid pandering to the press. I can't find the weight of an articulated bus, but the axle weight is probably lower, and they have a higher capacity.
Washington State addresses this with an explicit annual road tax assessed upon vehicle registration renewal. Oregon is trying to get more creative.
That is what most (I think) EU countries do.
The UK calls it VED. The table on that page shows it varies according to the fuel efficiency of the vehicle (measured by how much CO2 it produces per km driven).
The aim is to reduce CO2 production, so it's likely oil-burning vehicles will continue to be more expensive than electric powered ones, although the 0g/km category probably won't stay at £0 forever.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're still reading this: what is PTO?
Paid time off.
I don't know where Doctor_Jest is from, but in the UK it's the general term encompassing all kinds of paid leave from work -- holiday, sick leave, parental/adoption leave, certain union related activities, etc.
Either way, I got 6 weeks of PTO that I can start taking January 1st... so I'm covered if I get the flu.
Presumably not if he gets ill in December, after using up all/most of the time off.
Even when I'm wearing headphones, I often want to hear what's going on around me, whether it's "the destination of this train has now changed", "excuse me, do you have the time", or "what you fucking looking at?!". Or, for that matter, "the captain has switched on the seat-belt sign".
If anything, buds may help prevent tinnitus. If listening to music in a loud environment (like an airplane), the isolation provided by in-ear buds allows you to listen at MUCH lower volume levels than you might with non-isolating headphones.
This is true. However, I can often hear the music from other peoples' earphones when I get off a train, and that means it's probably too loud.
It's important in a variably-noisy environment (e.g. underground train) to set the volume appropriately in a quiet place and not increase it.
The analysis could probably be tailored to fit any assertion you wanted to make. A breakdown by state in the US probably reveals significant discrepancies.
And if the UK were split into constituent parts, no US state is likely to be worse than Scotland for general health and life expectancy.
From the summary: "The report notes that average life expectancy for American men, at 75.6 years"
From your link: "Men in Scotland are expected to live for 76 years"
Your comment is the only one that's not a joke, shame.
I wonder if this technique could be used with mosquitoes to find people. I.e. remember them verifying Bin Laden's location using DNA collected from a fake inoculation campaign
if not yet, it probably won't be long.
The taxonomists (and botanists, zoologists etc) have only recently been able to discover new species by sequencing the DNA. Previously, it took laborious searching and comparison of samples -- especially difficult with insects -- and that's not so accurate. Now, you can lay out some sticky paper and feed whatever sticks through a machine.
It's even better in the UK, where for a small illness you can't be required to visit a doctor.
It's the first thing on the Government page about sick leave: https://www.gov.uk/taking-sick-leave "Employees only need a fit note from a doctor after 7 days off work sick and have the right to use their statutory holiday entitlement during their sickness."
But the UK Railways are measured in Miles and Chains.
Old ones (which is most of the distance).
The London Underground, and anything built more recently (mostly various tram systems, but there are some proper railways), is measured in millimetres. Possibly massively refurbished ones too.
In any case, AIUI the actual work is done in millimetres. The miles and chains is mostly used to locate the site, "replace 100 metres of track on the northbound line at 82 miles4 chains from datum". (Source: someone at the DfT, so practical usage may or may not differ.)
Go into a British pub and ask for "a coke" and you could end up with either a half or a pint, which seems odd given that "a beer" will always get you a pint. However, nothing wrong with the European model of "a large beer" (500ml) or "a small beer" (250ml)...
Well, almost always. Sometimes "a beer" will get you a bottle, which might be 500mL, 300mL, 275mL, or something else. Not very likely in a traditional pub, but it happens in places that sell mostly wine or cocktails.
A more important improvement to British pubs would be displaying a price list. Last time I bought "two large cokes" in a pub it cost £5.20!
We used to write 'gramme' in British English, I'm not sure when or why we changed preference.
Top Google hit was the Wikipedia Manual of Style: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Spelling#Preferred_variants
(We use "programme" for a TV programme, and "program" for a computer program, which is probably US influence, but I doubt the US influenced 'gram(me)'!)
(I don't disagree that the American spelling should be meter, it obviously should, and the British/Commonwealth/International/whatever one should be metre.)
You probably ended up with far more replies than necessary due to the way Slashdot hides low-score comments on popular stories. I didn't see any other comments when I made mine, but they were there. I think the website doesn't work very well once there are more than ~250 comments, and this story now has over 1250, making it the fifth-most commented-on this quarter. (Would be 2nd, if it wasn't for the school shooting.)
I think your reply says more about you than me.
I live in the UK. Google.co.uk is the default.
I assume the DMCA results are removed because Google is a US company, and that they'd be removed on all international versions of the site.
It's just occurred to me that although I have a biometric passport, it can't store my fingerprints (they didn't take them when I got it).
This must be for "risky" people with particular kinds of visas.
I used Google search in China, and found it very unreliable. .COM wouldn't work at all, and .com.hm was erratic, so I used .co.uk. Some pages would load fine, but others wouldn't -- the first network packet (mostly the HTML header, title, etc) would be received, then the TCP connection would be reset. I suspect Google had something in the page like "Due to the government ... some results have been removed", and the Great Firewall blocked these packets and shut the connection.
Google displays a notice when I search certain terms, almost always for copyright infringement. Example I came across yesterday: https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=opera&q=knife+party+internet+friends
"In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 2 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org."
The link goes to http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=505954
We just make them a lot taller, about 5 feet I think.
In Britain those are called "snow poles", and the reflective dots in the road are either "cateyes" or just reflectors. The reflectors on multi-lane roads in the UK are different colours depending where they are -- red for the side of the road, yellow for the middle, white for lane boundaries, and green for a slip-road or junction. I think the front and back of snow poles are coloured, but it's far too mild round here for them to be necessary (9C at the moment).
Here: http://www.traffictechnologytoday.com/news.php?NewsID=40952 they say there are LED studs on the M42 (somewhere near Birmingham).
Americans may well have different words.
Word processors, printer drivers, operating systems, central heating controllers, sequencers, web servers, should be free - games, music compositions, etc. - not so much.
I don't understand - So if I create great software to manage an HVAC system to great efficiency I have to give it away, but if I make Angry Birds I don't? What's the difference?
Having purchased the HVAC system I might want to make changes to it, by changing the software. It's an important thing. (RMS started all this stuff when he couldn't get the source code to a printer driver).
Angry Birds isn't important.
I object to the requirement for visitors to give their fingerprints. I refuse to go to any country which has that policy, and I hope you too will refuse to go to any country that would demand your fingerprints.
Such as the United States?
Yes, they took mine last time I visited the US. I think if you were to visit here (UK) your fingerprints would be validated against those in the biometric passport (or visa), unless you live here.
http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/customs-travel/Enteringtheuk/fingerprint-checks-at-border/
"Passengers will need to provide their fingerprints each time they travel to the UK with a visa, entry clearance or biometric residence permit. Fingerprints will be held for a maximum of two working days, and will then be destroyed."
Does the US destroy the data?
Actually, milk is the one example where we don't tend to use metric in the UK - I've got a 2.272 litre (4 pint) bottle in my hand right now... Other dairy products like yoghurt and cream, fair enough, they're metric, but we still haven't let go of imperial measures for milk and beer, because 500ml is not quite enough.
Not quite -- most corner shops sell milk in 500mL multiples, and the 'luxury' brands (Cravendale, 'Tesco Finest' etc) do too. Since the quantity is slightly smaller it makes the price look better, for anyone that doesn't read the "per 100mL" number.
I wouldn't be surprised if other dairies switch the size of their bottles as the price of 1.14L reaches £1.
http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/shelves/fresh_milk_in_tesco.html shows the variety of sizes.
Most cans are 440mL on here: http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/#/shelves/beer_in_tesco.html and most bottles only 275mL. 500mL would be an improvement!
So, how many cubic meters in a liter (in your head, please, and quickly)?
A thousandth. If you don't know it, at least you can calculate it. A litre is 0.1m*0.1m*0.1m.
How many gallons in an acre-foot*? How many litres in 1000m^3?
(*Evidently a bad question, as Wikipedia says there are two kinds of acre-foot.)
How many grams of water in a cubic meter of water?
1m^3 of water is 1000kg, so 1,000,000g.
And why aren't either of these 1?
1 tonne, if you prefer. Not SI, but it is metric.
However, I don't know why not, and it doesn't really matter. Imperial has lots of different names -- you've used quart, for example. Metric has single-word names for a few everyday quantities (litre, tonne) and the rest are formed by using the prefixes -- something quart-sized would be measured in litres, but something fluid ounce sized in mL. The conversion between L and mL is easy, and sometimes (not all the time) useful.
it sucks for the average housewife. Seldom does one need ten times as much of something; but 2 or 4 times is pretty common. When you go to the grocery store, is everything packaged in even Liter increments?
Yes, or 250mL increments, or whatever is appropriate for the product. What increment would you expect it to be packed in?
Milk is 0.5L, 1L, 2L, but butter is 125g, 250g, 500g. Recipes would usually call for multiples of 25g.
I'll bet calculating cost/gram or cost/liter is as much of a challenge in Metric countries as cost/ounce is in the US.
Let's try.
1L milk, £0.80. 0.5L milk, £0.50. 2L milk, £1.50.
1 quart milk, $2.60. 1 pint milk, $1.20. ½pint, $0.70.
(In any case, in the UK the price per 100mL of milk is written on the tag on the shelf.)
I don't know how relevant this is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_number#Retail_packaging , but I think it is followed to some extent.
As the other reply says, you will generally find cream and milk is sold in Europe in quantities like 250mL, 500mL, 1L, 2L. Also, most European countries require shops (or at least large shops) to label the price per [appropriate amount], which is probably 100mL for milk or cream. It's very easy to compare when the price written on the shelf is:
Milk, 1L £0.80
(8p/100mL)
Milk, 2L £1.50
(7.5p/100mL)
(There are some oddities with that law in the UK. Apples are sometimes "per 100g" and sometimes "per apple", I think it depends if the shop has packed them into bags or not. But the shops make it difficult when they can, so it presumably helps customers for the 99% of things without the odd exceptions.)
letter being 8,5x11 inches in north america but 15cm x 30 cm in Europe.
That would be a very elongated piece of paper.
A4 paper is 210x297mm, and is never called "letter", always A4. The odd lengths are because the ratio of the sides is 1:sqrt(2), which means an A4 sheet cut in half (called A5) or doubled (called A3) has the same ratio as the A4 sheet, so a document can be very easily scaled or reduced to a sheet twice/half/etc times the size.
A0 has area 1m^2. Paper weight is measured in g/m^2, i.e. the weight of a piece of A0 paper. Since A4 is (A1-half, A2-quarter, A3-eighth) a sixteenth of that, I know that each sheet of A4 paper in the ream by our printer (80g/m^2) weighs 80/16 = 5 grams.
The Japanese really do eat just about everything. Live, dead, cooked, raw, they'll eat it. Even rice ground into powder and reconstituted into a rubbery paste (mochi).
Sounds better than the crap "we" eat: the waste meat parts ground into a rubbery paste (mechanically recovered meat).
Car: 2000kg, four tyres, contact patch 86,000mm^2, 2000kg*g/86,000mm^2 ~= 250kPa.
Racing bike with rider: 100kg, two wheels, contact patch 500mm^2, 100kg*g/1000mm^2 ~= 1000kPa.
Woman in high heels: ~2000 to >10,000kPa!
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/question506.htm
http://flocycling.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/flo-cyling-contact-patch-why-wider-is.html
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/JackGreen.shtml
There are ridges in the road in a bus lane near where I live in London -- many double-decker buses (23 tonnes!) stop at more-or-less the same position in the road (the bus stop). I think the surface was probably built before some bus routes were directed down that road, since that isn't the case for most roads. Or it might be a consequence of replacing an articulated bus service with double-decker buses, which was stupid pandering to the press. I can't find the weight of an articulated bus, but the axle weight is probably lower, and they have a higher capacity.
I promise my bike can handle a surface that most cars can't.
Any surface narrower than 3m, for a start :D
Washington State addresses this with an explicit annual road tax assessed upon vehicle registration renewal. Oregon is trying to get more creative.
That is what most (I think) EU countries do.
The UK calls it VED. The table on that page shows it varies according to the fuel efficiency of the vehicle (measured by how much CO2 it produces per km driven).
The aim is to reduce CO2 production, so it's likely oil-burning vehicles will continue to be more expensive than electric powered ones, although the 0g/km category probably won't stay at £0 forever.
(Electricity has a 5% VAT.)